Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla

Mexican priest and nationalist leader

• Born: May 8, 1753
• Birthplace: Corralejos, Mexico
• Died: July 30, 1811
• Place of death: Chihuahua, Mexico

Although he personally failed and died for his attempt, Hidalgo initiated the process that led to Mexico’s independence from Spain and left an example that inspired the leaders who achieved his goal.

Early Life

Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (mee-GEHL ee-DAHL-goh ee kohs-TEE-yah) and his four siblings were raised on a ranch managed by his father in Guanajuato, northwest of Mexico City. Descended from a Spanish criollo family that had lived in Mexico for several generations, Hidalgo was encouraged to advance himself through education. He was sent to Valladolid (now known as Morelia), in Michoacán, southwest of Guanajuato, and his acute intellect developed in the best educational institutions of New Spain, as colonial Mexico was known. Educated first by Jesuits, he became exposed to Enlightenment thought. After the government’s suppression of the Jesuits in 1767, Hidalgo studied at the Colegio de San Nicolás Obispo, a noted seminary. From Morelia he went to the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico in Mexico City, where he received degrees in philosophy and theology. In 1778, he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest.

Life’s Work

Hidalgo’s initial career was not as a parish priest but as a teacher in San Nicolás Obispo. Keen-witted and sociable, he was admired by his students and appreciated by colleagues for his intellectual prowess and became the college’s head in 1790. However, Hidalgo’s clerical vocation had decidedly secular characteristics. He fathered three children with two women and acquired several ranches. After falling into debt, he took up gambling and mismanaged college funds. In 1792 he was removed as college head and assigned to parish duties.

Hidalgo spent the pastoral phase of his career at churches in several provinces, mostly within in an arc north and west of the capital city. The last of his parishes, from 1803 to 1810, was in the poor Indian village of Dolores, in Hidalgo, northeast of Mexico City. What distinguished Hidalgo’s work in his parish assignments was not so much his zeal for the spiritual life of his parishioners but his concern for their intellectual development and material welfare. As an apostle of the Enlightenment, he evangelized for human betterment through development of practical skills and applied knowledge.

Hidalgo organized musical, theatrical, and social events. He favored free public education and built a personal library of works in numerous languages on literature, natural philosophy, economics, and government that he shared with others. Many of his Dolores parishioners saw their lives significantly improved. He organized manufacturing activities, setting up curing tanks to tan hides and firing kilns to form tiles and bricks. He managed agricultural activities with practical commercial benefits: cultivating grapes to make wine, silkworms to make fine fabrics, and bees to make honey.

Hidalgo confidently carried out these measures in an atmosphere of acceptance and admiration. However, he was challenging an established order that demanded deference from subordinate masses at a time when larger sociopolitical forces increasingly destabilized that order. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the English-speaking colonies north of Mexico had formed a democratic republic. An armed revolution in France overthrew the monarchy, attracting significant clerical support. Revolutionary anarchy in France also led to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who successfully overthrew established monarchies throughout Europe. In 1808, Napoleon forced the Spanish king Ferdinand VII to flee, laying the entire Spanish Empire open to turmoil.

Like many members of provincial Mexican elites during this period, Hidalgo grew increasingly critical of the fiscal deprivations, economic stagnation, and political repression of the Spanish government. The heaviest burden of these policies fell on the mass of the indigenous and mixed-blood mestizo populations. The overthrow of royal government in Madrid presented an ideal opportunity to remove its representatives in Mexico.

Through his friendship with a member of the local militia, Captain Ignacio Allende, Hidalgo began attending secret meetings in 1810 that discussed replacing the Spanish government with a local one. With the nascent manufacturing base he had established in Dolores, Hidalgo supervised the production of primitive armaments. On September 16, 1810, after the group’s plot was denounced. Hidalgo and Allende decided to begin their uprising immediately, as further planning was no longer an option. During the religious service he conducted on that day, Hidalgo announced his historic “cry [grito] of Dolores,” launching the process that eventually would separate Mexico from Spain.

Forging an alliance of militant local elites and an enraged mass of rural workers, Hidalgo led his followers behind a banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe and became their commanding general. He and Allende initially enjoyed a series of victories. From late September to the end of October, they captured the important urban centers of Guanajuato, Morelia, and Guadalajara, and advanced to the outskirts of Mexico City. However, with his troops poorly organized and short of munitions, Hidalgo decided to delay taking the capital. Local elites, moreover, were becoming increasingly fearful of supporting Hidalgo because of the ferocious tactics his peasant followers used.

Meanwhile, government forces began to reverse the advances of the rebellious forces. After losing Guanajuato, Hidalgo attempted to establish a formal government in Guadalajara, where he appointed ministers, proclaimed laws, managed propaganda, reorganized the militia, and authorized executions. Tens of thousands of volunteers joined him. Nevertheless, on January 17, 1811, Hidalgo and Allende suffered massive losses against government forces in a decisive battle at Calderón Bridge.

Hidalgo and his colleagues attempted to escape to the north, into the United States, but Hidalgo was captured, imprisoned in Chihuahua, and tried before both martial and ecclesiastical courts. Stripped of his status as a priest, he was put before a firing squad on July 30, 1811, and then beheaded at Chihuahua. His head and those of the other conspirators were then displayed on stakes in a public square.

Significance

The call for independence that Hidalgo announced on the morning of September 16, 1810, became the iconic symbol of the birth of the Mexican nation. That image is as important in Mexican history as the midnight ride of Paul Revere is in American history. Sometimes called the Father of the Nation, Hidalgo nonetheless produced a still-born revolution, and his military failures brought about his own death. Nevertheless, he lit the spark that would ignited the rebellion that resulted in Mexico’s full independence in 1821. Following Hidalgo’s example, a former seminary student of his, José María Morelos (1765-1815), led the next phase of the independence movement.

Hidalgo’s uprising recalls that of Tupac Amaru II in 1780 against repressive colonial authority in Spanish Peru. Both men enjoyed initial successes. However, they lost important local support as the enraged peasants, who constituted the mass of the popular militia, increasingly frightened the powerful upper classes because of the brutal revenges they inflicted on their oppressors.

With independence, Mexican criollo elites supplanted the Spanish. However, they continued the subordination of the indigenous masses. This repression eventually set off the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, despite the considerable subsequent incorporation of indigenous culture into the definition of the independent Mexican nation, economic and sociopolitical divisions have continued to challenge the country’s sovereignty.

Bibliography

Archer, Chirston I., ed. The Birth of Modern Mexico, 1780-1824. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2003. Collection of articles by various scholars concentrating on conditions and strategies for Mexican independence, placing ideas and actions of Hidalgo in historical context.

Fariss, Nancy M. Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 1759-1821: The Crisis of Ecclesiastical Privilege. London: Athlone, 1968. Examines intellectual, political, social, and economic dilemmas and contradictions of Roman Catholic clergy in the decades preceding Mexico’s independence and positions them in relation to it.

Hamil, Hugh M. The Hidalgo Revolt: Prelude to Mexican Independence. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Examines the complex of historical factors and settings that gave Hidalgo the role of a catalyst and initiator, but not the cause, of Mexican independence.

Hammett, Brian R. Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions, 1750-1824. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Details over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the changing socioeconomic circumstances and political responses in Guadalajara, Guanajuato, Michoacán, and Puebla, the central Mexican provinces from which the independence movement emerged.

Lynch, John. Spanish American Revolutions, 1808-1826. 2d ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. Noted work by a renowned scholar on the wars of independence in Mexico and Central and South America, placing the uprising of Hidalgo in a wider historical context.

Miller, Hubert J. Padre Miguel Hidalgo: Father of Mexican Independence. Rev. ed. Edinburgh: University of Texas-Pan American University Press, 2004. Brief biography of Hidalgo that includes illustrations and maps; originally produced as part of Texas’s sesquicentennial celebration.

Tutino, John. From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750-1940. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Places Hidalgo’s uprising within the context of two centuries of the straitened rural conditions and peasant rebellions that fomented Mexico’s independence movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century and its revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Viles, Donald M. Battles, Cuautla and Bridge of Calderon. Garibaldi, Oreg.: Donald M. Viles, 1985. Study, accompanied by maps, of areas in which Hidalgo led most his decisive military actions in his thwarted attempt for Mexican independence.